And you only get the year of protection **IF** you have filed a
provisional patent application, which expires 12 months after it's
issued. You must then file a non-provisional patent application before
the year runs out, or you cannot patent the techniques.
Jeff
Marty Fouts wrote:
>
> IANAL; this is not legal advice.
>
> The 'one year' you are referring to is from 'disclosure', not from released
> product. "disclosure" in this case is a legal term-of-art. Further, there
> is a difference between US and European Union patent law, in that, IIRC, EU
> law requires patent application before _public_ disclosure. In effect,
> "disclosure" means revealing the idea to anyone, inside your organization or
> out, but there are all sorts of corner cases in the law.
>
> Nolo Press had a good book that discusses copyright and patent law, although
> they may not have had the chance to update it to reflect recent changes.
>
> In any event, if you are serious about either getting or trying to overturn
> a patent, you need to see a lawyer specializing in patent law, because case
> law frequently changes the nuances in this area.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: jesse [mailto:jesse@wirex.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 06, 2000 10:53 AM
> To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: Tux 2 patents
>
> On Fri, Oct 06, 2000 at 09:13:25AM +0200, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > > Once you use the technique and it's documented as clear by a patent
> > > lawyer, it will be safe for you to use forever, particularly if it's
> > > in the public domain. This is winning....
> >
> > This is good to know, but what I was talking about is taking it *out of
> > the closed source* domain. The idea is to take our best ideas out of
> > the closed source domain. After a few years of doing that, it's my
> > guess that the evil software patent system would keel over and die.
>
> IANAL, but I believe that once you've implemented a method in a released
> product, you have only one year to file the patents for it. If you don't
> file patents for it within this time period, it becomes public domain. I
> think it would be possible to invalidate their patents, but I don't think
> it would be possible to get your own patent on it after the fact and refuse
> to let them use it.
>
> -Jesse
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Oct 06 2000 - 14:59:05 EDT